You Play the Black & the Red Comes Up Up (11 page)

THE WAY THINGS WERE

I
was working on top of the chute when who should come up the stairs but old Smitty.

"Well, well," I said. "What do you know if it ain't the Navy. The fleet's in again."

He didn't say anything. He just grinned like he was glad to be back and he'd been a long time getting here and all that time he'd been thinking of reaching here. We were right glad to see each other again.

"Well, well," I said. "How was Iowa or Idaho or wherever it was?"

"Iowa," he said. "Best part of it's blown down to Texas. But at that there ain't as much sand in Texas as there used to be."

"How come?"

"I got about half of it in my ears right now."

"You come through Texas? Why did you make it that way?"

"An Army guy gave me a lift down to Fort Bliss. I come through G
il
a Bend and Yuma and El Centro, bumming rides. Boy, the roads are lousy with hitchers."

It was like old times, except he looked so bad like he'd had a tough time coming through. I gave him a cigarette. He was hungry for a cigarrette. You could tell that from the
way his hands started shaking when he tried to light it. But I could see he didn't want me to say anything about it.

I said, "How was the old man. He get better?"

"That sonofabitch," he said. "He's tougher'n an old boot. He'd live out of plain meanness. And the better he got the worse he was. I couldn't stand it no more."

"Sure, I know," I said. "Once I had a stepfather like that."

We sat there smoking and not talking and Smitty passed right out and went to sleep. I went on shifting the gondolas round, and I got to thinking about my own father. He was a sharecropper from Alabama and we followed the cotton out West. I can't remember much of that, except I kn
ow we had an old Model-T lizzie
. It seemed like each year we piled in it and moved to another place. | can remember that lizzie plainly, and how it always boiled coming over the mountains.
I
can remember it with all the buckets and pans and the mattress tied on the back, going one-lunging up the hills. Some of it
I
can remember only in spots and some is clear. One of the first things I remember is standing by the roadside one day in a place, I don't know where, and my old man standing there and my brother and mother in the car.
I
was with my old man, and I know we were standing there waiting, with no gas and no money, waiting for the cars to come past. Only when the cars came the old man wouldn't make any move. It was like he couldn't. He'd try to, then he'd just stand and watch the car go past and the dust streaking up behind and hanging in the air for five minutes after the car was gone.

I remember that place plain as if it were yesterday, because there was a big range that was gold and orange and blue. I never saw mountains that had more color in them. And we had to go over that range, and I was thinking, just as a kid, that if ever we got over those golden mountains everything would be different and the land would be different—like the promised land in the Bible. I guess I am like my old man, because he was always that way, figuring if we could get a little farther west things would be better and all different and we'd get plenty of sourbelly in the beans.

I remember those mountains so plain, and the road going up to them, and the old man standing there, sort of helpless
and proud. I can remember the way. he looked, too; like the way his hat was and the way his arms hung down, and when I think about it I can smell the hot-oil smell of that old Model-T and the smell and the taste of the dust when the other cars went past with the old man trying to lift up his arm to flag them and it was like his pride wouldn't let his muscles do it, not even with Mother giving him hell.

I'll always remember that place and how my kid brother finally flagged a car, tiny like he was. The man was sore at first and I remember he said that this was the first state he'd ever been in where the beggars worked in automobiles. Then the old man walked away to the other side of the car like he had to fix something there, and my mother and my kid brother talked to the guy and finally he took the old man with him. I don't remember what happened after that. I can only remember the old man riding away, and saying nothing. I guess he must have begged some money and bought gas, because we must have got over the golden mountains somehow. But I don't remember that.

I've always looked for that place since, but I never saw it again on my travels. I couldn't ever miss out if I saw it again. I remember it so plain.

It's funny how you remember. And I remember after that when we were down near Lawton in Oklahoma, and even today I know just how the cotton gin looked and how it smelled, and I remember the Indians walking on B street on Saturday afternoon and the soldiers from Fort Sill and the trolley line and all that I remember plain. I remember my father working then and being behind the plow and going so fast I couldn't keep up with him. He was a great hand with horses or mules. There wasn't a team of mules ever born that could walk him ragged. He'd outwork any team there was. He was even a bigger man than I am, and I'm plenty built. I'm double-built, but he was bigger than I am even now. And I remem
ber him behind that plow at Law
ton, and the way he wore the same hat all the time.

Then we must have moved again, because we were near Roswell in New Mexico living in an adobe shack and there was El Capitan mountain always blue, and up beyond the Sierra Blancas, white with
snow all the time, and I remem
ber the way the light was there, very clear and the m
ountains
sharp-edged and the air always looking like there was extra light behind the mountains. I won't forget that year. It was the year the roots of the apple trees hit hardpan and the orchards began to die off and folks were all broke or began moving farther west, and the dams they'd built were no good becaus
e
somehow the water just went on down into the soil in hidden passages and never would fill up the dams. They had been opening up that country and building towns and spur railroads, but everyone went broke.

That was the way it was. Something always happened; like the season went dry or some new kind of bugs came or the cotton didn't make and the fields all stood brown and ugly as a Mexican
puta
and we were licked again; or if the cotton did make it was so cheap it wouldn't pay to haul it to the gins.

That's the way things went, with the country somehow drying up and the big shots in the cattle business always stealing the water rights.

I remember Mother talking about that, only the old man wouldn't say anything. He never could get to talking any time. If you said anything to him it was like he took a quarter of an hour to get words together to make the answer come out, and then generally it was too late, because mother would be talking of something else, so it wasn't any use answering. But I remember she was always after him about the water rights. He never said anything but I guess he tried to do something, because he was found dead up by the
Assequia,
right where it flowed off from the dam, and the
Assequia
was all busted and kicked in.

I remember running up there and seeing him face down right by the water, and they got a bunch of the Mexican neighbors to come down and help move him. He was a big man.

That's why I've never forgotten Mexicans. They were plenty good to us then. They came round and helped us dig a hole in the high ground to bury my old man in, and they even got their priest to come and say something although we weren't Catholics.

But the sheriff never did get anyone for shooting my old man. Anyhow, nobody worried much about a cotton cr
op
per in those parts, especially at that time. The cattle men were the big shots, and cattle
had to have the water. The lit
tle guys didn't stand a chance.

I don't remember leaving that place, but I remember being down near Dallas afterward and we were at school there. I was pretty good at school, and most of what they taught sort of took on me. But I found that nothing I learned ever came in very handy afterward in life. But you don't know that at school, and you study what they teach you, and I was pretty good. My kid brother was better though. He was real smart. Mother used to keep after us. She was from Arkansas, but her family came from Virginia.
I
guess they were a pretty good family. She always used to say so and try to make us believe we were something.

That was before she married Huckman. After that she started having kids and we moved up to Bisbee to the mines, and I quit high scho
ol. It was pretty crummy in Bis
bee and it seemed like she got tired and began letting things go hang. Not that I blame her. It was mostly after my kid brother got run over and was killed. He was swiping coal on the tracks and got killed right out. He was smart, all right. He could have been a smart man. I remember after that Mother sort of let go and she didn't keep after me much about things any more—like taking off my hat in the house and using a handkerchief and saying please and thank you and not saying ain't and okay, or not putting your elbows on the table at meals or not drinking when your mouth was full. I guess every mother goes for things like that in her kids.

Anyhow, it was cheesy up in that shack at Bisbee, and Huckman was as full of what makes the tall com grow as a man could ever be. Even when I was a kid I could see that. I was glad to get away when he kicked me out and that's how I joined the Marines. I was a big kid and I passed for eighteen but I was only tu
rned fifteen. I'll always remem
ber that Huckman, and I'm always thinking some day now I'll run into him. I was back in Bisbee once but they must have moved on because I couldn't find him in town. I guess I'll run into him one of these sweet days.

I can remember all those things, the places I've been, only at first it is in spots, and then, after Roswell, it's continuous all the time. But most of what I remember of my father is in spots. But I rem
ember it all right, and I remem
ber Huckman. And I was remembering all that and thinking it as I sat up there that afternoon with Smitty, with him being asleep and looking very contented as if even in his sleep he was glad to get back at that chute.

I don't know how to explain about how it was on top of that chute, but it was a place where you liked to be and when you were there you'd be satisfied inside you; like wanting a woman, only better, because when you got it you went on wanting it and never got full up of it or tired of it. And I knew Smitty felt the same way and had been thinking about it all the time he'd been thumbing his way west again.

I thought about all those things that afternoon while he slept. When he woke up I went down and got coffee and hamburgers and Smitty ate and kept looking round like he was seeing if everything was the way he remembered it. Finally he said:

"You know, I was always
going to build me a little plat
form out there. You could cut a little door here and have a front porch, and put a cot out there and sit there looking out over the ocean. It would be sitting on top of the world."

He sounded like he had been homesick for this place.

"Whyn't we do it?" I said. "The crossbeams are solid and we could have a swell hide-out."

He seemed so set on the place.

"Gees, it's good to be back here! I've been near three weeks on the way," he said.

"Look," I said. "This is your job. You ought to take it back."

"No," he said. "Not on your life. I just dropped in to see what the old place was like. I guess I'll blow along."

"I'll sock you on the snoot," I said. "And I can do it, too."

"No Marine ever could sock a gob," he said.

"No?" I asked him." Well, you try beating it.

"Look," I said. "I have some dough set by. You take the job and I'll find another."

He wouldn't agree to that, so finally we decided to split the job fifty-fifty, working every other night. He went down to see Gowen, who owned the concession. He said Gowan crabbed a bit until he figured out that he'd only have to pay us each twelve-fifty a week, and that way he'd save himself the three-fifty extra he had to pay a relief man on my night off.

And that's the way we left it. I was glad to have Smitty back. I had half my days free, and Sheila and I would drive up along the shore and sometimes back into the mountains and out onto the desert, driving all day and half the night.

Mamie didn't know but what I was working on the pier. I know it was a sort of raw deal on Mamie, but that's the way it was. And there was never anything wrong between me and Sheila, so I wasn't cheating on Mamie.

When Sheila would come she would be sitting in the same place, parked on the boulevard, waiting. Sometimes she didn't show up for a week or ten days. Then she'd be there two or three days running.

She would never say why she didn't come. If she was there she just sat over from the driver's seat. Then we'd drive. That's the way it was.